Philip Brennan 01 - The Surrogate

by Carver, Tania

  ‘She did,’ said Phil. ‘She was good.’ And an even better lover, he thought.

  He felt his chest tightening again at his own words, tried to ignore it. He sighed. He remembered the case well. How could he not?

  Gemma Hardy was in her mid-twenties, a dentist’s receptionist who lived in a shared flat in the Dutch Quarter. She had friends and a regular boyfriend. Life was good for Gemma Hardy, she was happy. But that was all about to change. Because Gemma had also attracted a stalker.

  At first it was just texts, then letters. Love letters, dark and twisted, the writer telling her that she was the only girl, his true love.That he would kill anyone who got in their way.That he would kill her rather than let her go with someone else.

  Scared, she contacted the police. Phil was handed the case. He and his team went through Gemma’s life intimately. They found no one, nothing that could possibly point to the perpetrator. They arranged for her flat to be watched. Saw no one apart from her friends and boyfriend. They were getting nowhere, she was still terrified. Then someone suggested bringing in a psychologist.

  Marina Esposito, a lecturer in psychology at nearby Essex University, was called in to consult. She specialised in deviant sexuality. The case was tailor-made for her. Along with Phil she examined every aspect of Gemma’s life, and they found their stalker: Martin Fletcher. Her flatmate’s boyfriend. He was arrested and confessed.

  And that should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. Not for Marina.

  ‘I doubt she’d do it, to tell you the truth, sir.’

  ‘I thought a bit of persuading, perhaps.’ Fenwick sounded surprised.

  Phil couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Persuading? Last time she worked with us she nearly died. Severed all links.You sure you want her?’

  ‘Super mentioned her personally. Good a place as any to start with. And if ever a case was right up her alley it’s this one.’ Fenwick’s voice changed gear then, moved from politician to friend, counsellor. Phil didn’t trust him when he did that. ‘Leave it to me, Phil. I’ll talk to her, see what I can do.’

  Phil closed his eyes. Marina was there. He shook his head. Marina was always there. He sighed. Fenwick was right. Whatever else had happened, she was the best. And he needed the best on this case. ‘Well, good luck with that.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Phil couldn’t tell if Fenwick was being sarcastic or not.

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then: ‘Are you sure you can handle this, Phil?’

  Phil was jolted back. ‘Don’t see why not. I’ve been CIO on high-profile cases before.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’ Fenwick’s voice was quiet. Solicitous.

  Phil couldn’t speak for a few seconds as he absorbed the impact of Fenwick’s words. He knows.The bastard knows.

  His heart started to beat faster again. It’s the case, he told himself, the baby, the seconds ticking away. That’s all it is, not . . . ‘Yes, sir, I can handle it.’

  ‘Good. Then I’ll talk to her. Because we’re going to need all the help we can get on this one. There’s a budget for this; it’s been upgraded as high priority so we don’t need to worry about that aspect. Extra manpower too. Personpower I should say. Let us not speak the language of dinosaurs in this department.’ He gave a snort.

  Phil wasn’t listening. He had butterflies in his stomach.

  ‘Right. Well, we’d better get going. The clock’s ticking and all that. ’

  ‘Right you are, sir.’

  Phil broke the connection. Stood staring at the phone, stunned at Fenwick’s words. But he didn’t have time to think about them now. He had another call to make.

  Somehow it didn’t seem to matter too much.

  Clayton emerged from the block of flats, joined him.

  ‘Ready, boss?’

  ‘Nearly,’ said Phil. He looked at Clayton, looked at his handset. Do it now. Get it over with.

  ‘Just got a call to make. Won’t be a moment.’

  He walked away for privacy, dialled the number. Hoped Clayton was out of earshot.

  It wasn’t good for morale to hear your boss get told off by his mum.

  7

  He had done it. Actually done it. Gone out and got her a baby, just like she had asked, just like he had promised to. Hester couldn’t believe it.

  But she looked down at the baby and frowned. It wasn’t right. Not right at all.

  She knew what babies looked like. Especially newborn ones. She’d seen them on TV. They were always happy and smiling, with hair. This one wasn’t. Small, wrinkled, shrivelled and pinky blue. More like Yoda than a baby. And it didn’t smile. Just twisted its face up and made a gurgling, wailing noise, like it was being tortured underwater.

  But it was a baby, so Hester would have to make the best of it. A baby of her own. And when you had a baby, you had to clothe it and feed it and make it grow. She knew that.

  It was wailing now. Hester brought her face into a smile.

  ‘Do you want feeding, baby?’ Her voice was an approximation of baby talk. Like she had heard on TV. ‘Do you?’ More wailing. ‘Mummy’s got something for you.’

  Mummy. Just the word . . .

  She went to the fridge, took out a bottle, placed it in the microwave. She had given him a list of what she wanted and he had got the lot. Powdered milk. Bottles. Nappies. Everything the books said.

  She waited for the ping. Took it out.

  ‘Just right,’ she said, squirting some into her own mouth. She stuck the teat into the baby’s mouth, waited while it sucked hard. ‘That’s it. That’s better . . .’

  Yes, it was tiny and pink and shrivelled. Yoda. But unlike Yoda its eyes wouldn’t open all the way, no matter how much Hester pulled at them. That wasn’t important, though. She looked down at the infant. She had wrapped it in blankets because that was the right thing to do, but it still looked cold. Like its skin wasn’t the right colour. But it didn’t matter. Hester had a baby. At last. That was the important thing. And she had to bond. That was important too.

  She looked down at it again, feeding, managed a smile. ‘I’ve been through a lot to get you,’ she said, her usually broken voice sounding like a baby coo, ‘a lot. I could have just walked in somewhere, taken you, but that wouldn’t have been right, would it? No . . . Because you’d have been someone else’s by then, wouldn’t you? You’d have a different mummy and you’d have to forget her before you met me.’ She sighed. ‘Yes, I’ve been through a lot. But you were worth it . . .’

  The baby spat the teat out, began to cough. Hester felt anger rising inside herself. It wasn’t doing what it was supposed to. It should take all the bottle. The book said. TV said.

  ‘Don’t you fuckin’ do that,’ she said, no trace now of baby talk. ‘Take it . . .’

  She shoved the teat back in the baby’s mouth again, forced it to drink. Pushed the rising anger back down.

  The baby stopped coughing, took the teat. That was better.

  It was shrivelled and the wrong colour. And it wailed and shat all the time. She hated that. But it was a baby. And that was all she had wanted. So she would put up with it.

  ‘But you’d better start to be like the TV babies,’ she said to its bare head, ‘the proper babies, or there’ll be trouble . . .’

  The baby kicked and wriggled, tried to get away from the bottle.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you need to be big and strong. And you’re not finished until I say you’re finished . . .’

  Milk ran down the baby’s cheeks. It had finished feeding. Hester kept the teat in place.

  She smiled, looked at her watch. Closed her eyes. It would be time for her husband to go out soon.Yes, she had a baby now but his work wasn’t done. There was still the list to be attended to. Then, when he had finished, he would come back to her and they would all settle in. A real family. Complete. She opened her eyes. Smiled. Content with her life.

  For now.

  8

  ‘Fancy a coffee?’ The bright
and perky voice was in Marina’s ear once more.

  Marina turned. Caroline was standing with some of the other women from the group, heading towards the door.

  ‘A few of us usually head off into town,’ Caroline said. ‘Go to Life for a coffee. Well, those of us who can still drink it. And usually a little something else.’

  ‘Doesn’t that undo everything you’ve just done here?’ asked Marina.

  Caroline laughed, shrugged. ‘What’s life without a few little treats?’

  Marina smiled. ‘That’s kind, thanks, but I have to get back to work.’

  Caroline, Marina noticed, was now dressed in the latest in designer and high-end high-street maternity wear. She had also done her make-up in the time it had taken Marina to get showered and dressed. How had she managed that?

  Caroline smiled again. ‘You sure?’

  And Marina saw something in her features she hadn’t noticed earlier. Tiredness, lines around the eyes. Her smile too brittle. Caroline was older than Marina had first thought, older than her peers in the group. She dressed younger, acted younger, but she couldn’t quite hide the extra years.

  ‘It would be lovely to have you along.’

  Marina returned the smile. ‘Maybe next time.’

  ‘Okay, then. Next time.’ Caroline turned, went off with her happy, chattering friends, all similarly dressed. They smiled as they passed, and Marina reciprocated, letting it fade once they had all exited.

  She watched them go, talking and laughing. They were a group Marina would have instantly categorised, even stereotyped. Middle class, husbands at work, the type of women who would have pain-free births and, by hitting the gym and the fad diets, get their pre-pregnancy figures back within a week. The type of women other women would envy and even secretly despise.

  From a distance Caroline looked like she was one of the group, but Marina sensed something different about her. Something separate. Maybe that was why she had wanted Marina to go with them. Or maybe she was just being friendly. No matter. Not her problem. Marina waited until they had all gone, walked through the foyer of Leisure World.

  The piped muzak drowned out the shrieks, cries and splashes of schoolchildren cramming in five minutes of play after their prescribed swimming lessons, the multicoloured flume and slide tubes sticking out of the side of the building taking a pounding. She walked through the doors and on to the forecourt. The noise was bad enough but the chlorinated smell was seriously starting to assault her nostrils. She knew things like that happened in pregnancy. The senses were heightened; women became intolerant of scents that had never previously bothered them. She knew one woman from university who couldn’t stand the smell of her own husband. A shiver of dread ran through her body. She hoped nothing like that happened to her.

  Outside, she stood on the kerb of the car park on the Avenue of Remembrance, pulled her coat close to her to keep out the November cold, waited for the cab that would take her back to her new office and her afternoon clients. She had showered but her muscles were still aching, throbbing. She would suffer tomorrow.

  A few minutes later, a 4x4 went past, tooted. Caroline and her friends. Marina gave a smile that disappeared as the car rounded the corner.

  The changes in her life in such a short space of time had been huge. Leaving the comfort and safety of the university to go into private practice - although by the time she left it didn’t feel safe or comfortable - and the fact that Tony, her long-term partner, had proposed to her. But the most important change had been the baby. Unplanned and, initially, unwanted, she was still coming to terms with it. She felt she always would be.

  She looked at her watch, getting impatient for the cab, killing time by working out what she would be doing if she were still at the university. Probably preparing for her second-year class, gathering together papers, books and notes in her old office, readying herself for the seminar she would be about to give. Chimerical Masks and Dissociation in the Perception of the Self. Something like that.

  The self. Her hands, as they so often did these days, went automatically underneath her coat to her stomach. Began stroking the bump. Slight to a disinterested onlooker’s eyes, but to her enormous. And, she knew, it would only get bigger. This self - her self - was one she barely recognised any more. When she thought of her old life, her old self, she became choked, felt like crying. But she was beyond the tears stage now. Four months beyond.

  She felt something flutter. Like butterflies in her stomach. Big butterflies. She jumped, startled and scared. Tried to breathe deeply, calm down. It was natural, it was expected. It was what the body did. But not her body. She didn’t feel it was her body any more. She was just a carrier, a vessel for this child. Which was fine while she was carrying, but when it had left her, what would she be then?

  The physical stuff was scary enough - the changes that would occur in her body as the baby grew and demanded life from her, the actual pain of childbirth itself and then how ravaged her body would be afterwards. And then there were the years as a mother to come.

  Her first response to the pregnancy was to get rid of it. Get it out of her, don’t let it grow, take her over, like some hideous invasion-of-the-bodysnatchers-type creature. And with her starting up in private practice it was the wrong time, if nothing else.

  Tony said he would be fine with whatever she wanted to do. It was her body, after all. So she decided on a termination. But when the time came, she couldn’t go through with it.

  Marina had swallowed her fear, tried to live with it. Prenatal yoga, relaxation and meditation, eating the right things, not drinking. Luckily she wasn’t one of those women who were sick all the time and couldn’t eat anything. Or at least not yet. Feeling the baby grow inside her was bad enough. That would have been intolerable. She also thought that being with other pregnant women would help. Take away the fear, the uncertainty. And it had, for a while. But now that she was alone again she felt the old doubts coming back.

  She wondered how she had looked to the other women in the class. Long, dark hair, mercifully free of grey. Or rather chemically assisted to be free of grey. A pretty face for a thirty-six-year-old, she thought, just spoiled by worry. She had good bone structure due to her Italian parentage; the worry she had added herself. Her eyes looked sunken, hollow, like a ghost waiting to be brought back to life. Once she had resigned herself to the baby she had hoped it would do that. Four months in and it hadn’t. She was beginning to doubt that it ever would. She needed something else.

  She checked her watch, stamped her feet. The cab driver had said goodbye to his tip.

  From within her bag, her mobile rang.

  Sighing, she extracted her hand from her coat, went to answer it. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Marina? Marina Esposito?’

  She knew that voice. It took her a few seconds to place, but she did it. And gave an involuntary gasp. DCI Ben Fenwick. She exhaled slowly.

  ‘Ben Fenwick?’

  ‘Yes, Marina, hi. Sorry to bother you. I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked round. And there in front of her was Martin Fletcher. Advancing on her, features twisted by hate.

  She screwed her eyes up tight, opened them again. Nothing but the cold car park, the missing cab. The faint sounds of screaming children in the background. Martin Fletcher had gone. But Ben Fenwick’s voice was still on the phone.

  ‘Marina? You still there?’

  ‘Yes . . . yes, Ben. I’m still here.’

  ‘Look, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

  That was all she needed to hear and immediately the barrier was back up. ‘Look, I’m . . . I’m busy. Can we do this another time?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. We’ve got a problem.’

  ‘What kind?’

  He sighed. ‘The worst kind.’

  She wanted to push the button, end the call. Get into her cab - if it ever arrived - and forget Ben Fenwick had phoned. Instead she said, ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘A new case has c
ome up and we need help.Your help.’ He paused as if thinking over what to say next. ‘Look, I realise this may be difficult for you . . .’

  She saw Martin Fletcher advancing towards her out of the corner of her eye again, felt blind, trapped panic rise in her chest. She blinked him away, breathed deeply.

  She kept her voice low, contained. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s . . . it’s not really the kind of thing we can discuss over the phone. Best if we talk in person.’